A Path to Better Writing with Steve Graham

Steve Graham discusses the significance of writing in education, the challenges teachers face in teaching writing, and effective strategies to enhance students' writing skills.

In this episode, you'll hear about: 

1. the interconnectedness of writing and reading
2. the importance of feedback
3. the role of handwriting and typing in writing fluency 
4. the necessity of integrating writing instruction into the curriculum
5. the role of interactive writing as a bridge for early and progressing writers

Steve also shares his thoughts on the impact of 21st-century tools like AI on writing practices, and the ethical considerations surrounding AI in education.

Resources: 

• Focus Article: "A Path to Better Writing" by Steve Graham and Karen Harris

We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.

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Chapters

• 0:01 Teaching Writing
• 9:16 Effective Strategies for Improving Writing
• 18:50 Feedback Criteria and Writing Improvement
• 33:06 Embracing 21st Century Writing Tools
• 42:18 AI Ethics in Parenting and Education
• 52:27 Promoting Literacy Through Conversation

Transcript

Melissa: 0:01

Hi teacher friends, Are you feeling stuck when it comes to teaching writing? You likely have a tight schedule and students with various needs, but of course, you want to help all of your students become confident, effective writers. You know how important writing is, but figuring out how to teach it well can feel overwhelming.

Lori: 0:20

Writing is the most challenging literacy skill to teach and to learn. In this episode you'll hear from researcher Steve Graham about why writing is essential, why it's often such a challenge to teach and what makes a strong writing program, and the latest research that can transform your approach. By the end, you'll have fresh ideas and practical strategies to inspire both you and your students. Let's dive in. Hi teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa: 0:57

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori: 1:02

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.

Melissa: 1:07

Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, steve, welcome to the podcast. We're so excited to have you. I know every time I see research about writing, I see your name, so we're excited to dig into that research today.

Steve: 1:24

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Lori: 1:27

Yeah Well, I'm really excited to talk with you. I've listened to other podcasts that you've been on multiple times and I just really enjoy hearing from you. You're so reasonable and I just appreciate that so much. So I know today we're going to talk all about writing and writing instruction in particular. We know that writing is so important because it helps students, it helps people share their thinking, it helps us express ourselves. I'd love to hear from you what are some other reasons why you think, or what would you say why writing is so important.

Steve: 2:00

So I would go with three things. One is writing is important in and of itself in terms of how we use it. You know we use it to record information. We use it to share information. We use it to communicate with others. We use it to persuade others. We also use it to create imaginary worlds and entertain ourselves. Worlds and entertain ourselves. We use it to explore who we are. You know we also use it to explore our most you know inner thoughts when we do like diaries and stuff, and there's increasingly good evidence that when you write about the physiological and psychological issues you're facing, it helps you with those. So just the act of writing serves a lot of different purposes that you know range from healing purposes to sharing purposes.

Steve: 2:52

There's two other reasons, though, why writing is important, especially for school-age kids. One of those is that when you increase how much students write, reading comprehension gets better. Even on norm reference tests, that's really powerful. It's hard to move the needle on those kinds of tests. Also, when we teach writing, we have evidence that you become better in terms of phonological awareness, word reading skills, reading fluency and reading comprehension. That's pretty powerful.

Lori: 3:24

That's like everything yeah.

Steve: 3:26

Well, except for vocabulary. So, you know, it kind of moves the needle forward on reading. So you become a better reader by becoming a better writer. And then, finally, the third reason is that writing involves thinking, and so when we write about stuff that we're reading, or write about stuff that we're learning in class learning, you know we do better in terms of learning that material and remembering it over time. So you know, those are the, I think, the big three on this. It's a really versatile tool. It helps you become a better reader and it helps you learn.

Melissa: 4:04

It's so funny. I actually I take notes during podcasts. Even though I have, I have no need for them because we're recording this, so I could go back and listen many times, but I I feel like that I just have to write, as it's like my learning tool, as I'm listening to even you right now, I'm writing down those three things because I feel like it helps me remember. So I feel validated that the research says that's true.

Steve: 4:28

Well, you know, the research feels validated as well, you know. So if people didn't, you know, recognize something in their own lives from the research in terms of what's happening, then you'd have to be, you know, you might be a little suspicious about the research.

Melissa: 4:43

All right. Well, you wrote an article with Karen Harris called A Path to Better Writing, and in that article you all said that helping students become better writers is not an easy task. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit, one about like why is it so difficult to teach writing, and why is it? Why is there so often little time devoted to it in schools, especially with what you just shared, with how much it can improve reading as well?

Steve: 5:09

Writing is really a very challenging task, mentally and in terms of effort, and there's a lot of things going on. And just to keep this kind of quick, you know you have at least five production processes. You know, basically you have to conceptualize or plan what you're going to do. You have to generate information. You have to take that information and translate it into acceptable sentences that convey your intended meaning and you have to transcribe those into actually written words. And all through this process there's reconceptualization going on. You're drawing from resources, from long-term memory, which includes what you know about the topic, what you know about writing and those particular processes, but also your beliefs, which can range from your confidence to your anxiety, to your attitudes towards writing in terms of your goals, goal orientation for doing this. In addition, writing can be influenced by your emotional states. So there's a lot going on here. You know, and we haven't even talked about outside the head, where you're drawing resources and things are going on. So this makes writing quite challenging.

Steve: 6:22

The question about why aren't we doing this more in the classroom, why isn't there more attention devoted to writing, I think is right on the money. But I would like to make one caveat here. We do see in observational studies that we're doing and also survey studies, that there are some teachers that are really doing a phenomenal job. So I don't want to drop this bucket and say everybody is not spending very much time on this. There's quite a few teachers that really are phenomenal.

Steve: 6:52

But I think there's several reasons why we don't see writing more commonly in the school. One, when we ask teachers about their preparation and national surveys, they're not very positive about the academy or the university or the college of education programs. An example of this we asked high school teachers about their preparation to teach writing English teachers. 70% of them said from the academy was inadequate. When we asked teachers about you know what kind of instruction they're getting, a small percentage say they have one course, but most teachers tell us they have one or two nights. So they're coming to the classroom without much preparation and I think that's particularly an issue.

Steve: 7:38

The other thing is a lot of teachers don't feel comfortable as writers. Now I'm not suggesting that the way to make for better writing instruction is to make teachers more comfortable writers, because I've seen some teachers who are not the greatest writers in the world but great teachers of writing. But if you don't feel comfortable with writing. If you don't feel prepared to write, then it's easy to see why other things get pushed forward, then it's easy to see why other things get pushed forward.

Steve: 8:06

And then the third thing is we're basically a casualty of the reform efforts around reading and STEM and mathematics. Writing has kind of been left out of this and time devoted to writing has been minimal, despite its power to improve reading and to improve learning. When the National Institute of Child, human and Health Development issued their report in 2000, taking a look at the big five in reading phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary fluency and reading comprehension my take is that it's incomplete. It should include writing. There may be other things that it should include, but it should definitely include writing, given the evidence we have. And that was the case then, but they didn't look in that direction.

Lori: 8:56

Yeah, this makes it so, I think, tricky to talk about, because it's like we want to include writing in a conversation, but there's a lot of places where writing has been left out and we need it to be included, based on what you're saying right, and especially in order to make big change, and it is such a lever. One thing I want to talk about from your piece are these four validated procedures that you can use to support students writing. They had a lot of percentile clout or they were like heavy lifting in terms of percentiles, so I guess I will just cue up for anyone listening or watching. This is an article that we will share widely on social. We'll drop it in your inbox, but it's the path to better writing that Melissa had mentioned earlier.

Lori: 9:47

And these high leverage I guess like strategies or procedures are really. I mean, I looked at those percentile points. I was like whoa, this is a lot, and to think about doing them all together, it's amazing. Can I cue you up for the first one? I don't know if you have your article memorized, steve.

Steve: 10:06

I pretty much know this, you do Okay.

Lori: 10:08

Well, then you go ahead. I'll just turn it over to you. What are these, what are these procedures and why are they so important and like, why are these things so high leverage?

Steve: 10:17

So let me give a little background to them. We conducted a meta-analysis with students in grades one to six to look at true experiments where kids were randomly assigned to either a writing intervention or a comparison group or no intervention, and quasi-experiments that had no random assignment but they did have pre-tests so that you could equate students at the start of the study. And one of the things that we found although I have a little caution on the first one is that an important part of a good writing program, a strong writing program, would be to have kids write. Now, that's obvious, right. It's kind of like playing. You know, if you're a kid in junior high school and you know you want to play basketball and you go out for the team, you have all these drills that you do to improve how well you play, but it's not the drills that you particularly enjoy it. We did find that writing, at least in that meta-analysis, had a positive effect on the quality of students' writing, and also in another meta-analysis, reading comprehension. As I mentioned before In a subsequent meta-analysis that we're working on now, we did not find that increasing the amount of time that students write at the elementary level, k-5, improved students' writing, but I would still make that central. Like I said before, when you write about what you're learning, when you write about what you read, it makes you a better reader, a better learner Plus, this is the whole reason to do the game. We use writing for all these purposes. We did find in the newer meta-analysis which was not in the one that we're talking about is that, for young kids, interactive writing, where teachers and students write together, say in kindergarten, first grade and second grade, had a pretty powerful effect. You know, had those big jumps in terms of student percentile that you were talking about.

Steve: 12:37

So that's one of the keys, I think, if students don't write and all you're doing is teaching them some kinds of support, giving feedback, you know, and that can come from teachers, it can come from peers, when it's structured so that students know what they're doing. It can come from yourself, from the, you know, from a student themselves, when they're taught how to assess their writing for particular purposes, having students engage in pre-writing activities to gather information, organize it, reading something, watching something to gather information for your writing, or even, you know, observing something on the playground, if you want to, you know, write about something that's happening out there. That gives you gifts for what you're going to say. And then things like graphic organizers help you, you know, get that information out of your head and organize it. So basic things like that, where we support writers as they write. Now I'm going to tell you what the simplest one of these is, and the biggest bang for the buck, so to speak, is if you're clear with kids about what your goal or goals for a writing piece are, they're much more likely to actually achieve those goals. You know. So if, if the idea I'm not suggesting this goal but if you want to a single page of paper in writing, if you say that to kids, you're more likely to get it. If you want to have a persuasive paper that deals with both sides of an argument, tell kids that they're much more likely to do that.

Steve: 14:10

A third thing is that we need to teach, and this is particularly important at three distinct levels. One we need to teach kids handwriting, spelling and, at least by the start of second grade, how to type. Now, you know those tools are constantly in flux right now and changing, but what we know is, until students become automatic and don't have to think about those skills, then what they do is they interfere with other writing processes like planning, drafting, revising and editing text. They have a negative effect on you. They're like a hobble. They keep you from doing what you can do. When you have kids dictate as an example text, they can generate much more text. This is all the way through adulthood that we see that.

Steve: 15:00

A second thing is kids need help in terms of translating the ideas that they do generate into sentences that convey their intended meaning and are grammatically correct. And our most effective procedure for doing that is something called sentence combining, where the teacher models how to take two smaller sentences and combine them while talking out loud into a larger sentence or more complex one. And then students help the teacher do that. Then they practice that with, say, a peer, then they practice it on their own and then they look to do that in their writing. And the third and really powerful way of improving students' writing is we need to teach them how to be more strategic as planners, as drafters, as revisers and editors. And we do that by teaching strategies and, like for a really simple one, it could be brainstorming with kindergarten kids. You know ideas for your writing, how to do that. We model it, they practice it until they can do it successfully themselves.

Steve: 16:03

More complex ones would be for something like a persuasive essay. You might start by thinking about all the things that support this side of the argument and all the things on the other side of the argument. That could be done individually, it could be done as a small group, it could be done as a whole class, and then you go through that and you decide which side of the argument you want to support. Pick out the things that you think are going to most make your strongest argument and the things that you think you most need to refute on the other side, and simply number the order in which you put them. And then, as you write, plan and write more. Much more complicated strategy, but appropriate around fourth grade. So those things need to happen as well.

Steve: 16:44

And then on the fourth one. So we'll see if I'm getting the right fourth one. There's actually a fifth one. A fourth one is we need to connect reading, writing and learning. You know which we already talked about. There's also a good bit of evidence that suggests that when you read and when you teach reading, you become a better writer. Read and when you teach reading, you become a better writer. And so we're at an advantage when we put a relatively equal emphasis on both reading and writing. In one of our meta-analysis we found that when it's about 60-40, 60% writing, 40% reading, 60% reading, 40% writing somewhere in there students get better when compared to the option of one or the other of reading and writing. They get better both in reading and in writing, and that includes reading comprehension and writing quality. So you know we know quite a bit about how to teach this skill.

Lori: 17:37

Yeah, you did just great. It seems like you really know your stuff. It's just good because you wrote it. Well, that helps. I mean, you're just living what you're preaching here.

Steve: 17:49

Right, there's one of the advantages it sticks with you better it does.

Melissa: 17:54

I have some follow-up questions on several of the things that you said. One of them I wanted to go back to was about giving feedback. I'm probably totally butchering some research, so tell me that I'm wrong, but I remember somewhere I saw some research that talked about how giving good feedback students who are able to give good feedback that actually was I don't want to say made them a better writer, but it was really valuable that they could give good feedback. Like that actually was. I don't want to say made them a better writer, but it was like really valuable that they could give good feedback in their own writing. Like it made their own writing better just because they were able, when they were taught, to give good feedback. One, is that true or am I totally making that up? And two, do you have any tips for helping students give good feedback? Because that's that is a hard task. I know as a former sixth grade teacher. It was tough to get them to give good feedback to each other.

Steve: 18:44

Well, you know, I'd like to pull your chain a little bit and say, no, it's completely untrue, but it is true, all right. So there is evidence that when you provide feedback using criteria that you've learned for doing that, your own writing gets better. And probably what's happening here is you internalize those criteria and then start to use it in your own writing. And as an example of this, charles MacArthur and I did a study with kids with learning disabilities a number of years ago and one of the things that we found is that when students started using criteria for giving feedback to their peers, we started seeing their first drafts of their papers their own papers get better and basically, you know, our take on that in terms of looking at those first drafts, was that they were starting to, you know, deal with those criteria in their own paper before they even started revising it. So I think that's a really powerful tool for doing this. I'm going to share a personal example as a way of thinking about giving feedback, and it's a failure story.

Melissa: 19:53

We learn from failure oh yeah, that moves, hopefully.

Steve: 19:57

Well, it did move to success. So the first time that I worked on a peer feedback study, I went out and I was after school and I met with I think the kids were in fifth grade this was quite a while ago. It was a young lady and a young man and I asked each of them to write a story and then I said you know, I'd like, I wanted to see how they gave feedback. And I said I asked the young man to give feedback to the young lady on the story. She read her story and you know he went to give feedback and he said that stunk, and a girl just threw a paper on the floor and you know it was after school. So she stormed out and I took my little black bag, so to speak, home and felt really bad about it but rethought what I was doing, and so I went out a couple of days later and I met with her before and I apologized for not thinking this through as well as I should have and I said I'd like for us to try something. I'm going to have him read his story to you and in this case it was. You needed to do that because there was so many misspellings and stuff in the story it made it hard for them, for her, to read his story. And then I said I want you to think about three things that you can tell him that you liked about the story. So you get started on a positive note and make this a conversation. And I want you to give him feedback. He's going to give you a paper. You're going to look at it. I want you to give him feedback on two things Any place that you think is unclear, I want you to put a question mark by. And any place that you think there could be more detail that you add that would help you understand, put a carrot by. Now this is particularly important because neither of these kids they both had places that were unclear and both of them didn't write a whole lot in terms of explaining what was going on. And then we worked on how to give the feedback and we made it conversational going on. And then we worked on how to give the feedback and we made it conversational. And so when he came in, when the two of them came into the room, we did that procedure and it worked great and that was the way that we kind of focused our first study, and so you know, what did we learn from that? Well, just throwing kids together is not a good idea. I should have known that to begin with. But second, being really clear and having concrete criteria and having a positive way of delivering feedback can be quite helpful. So I think those things are all important.

Steve: 22:32

I'll add something that we weren't thinking about then but increasingly has become a focal point in feedback studies and giving feedback. You know, think about a machine giving you feedback. Machine gives you feedback. Basically, the assumption is that you'll take that feedback and you use it.

Steve: 22:51

If a teacher gives you feedback, there's kind of that same assumption we have in our head that the teacher's right, the machine's right, so we need to do what they say.

Steve: 23:00

But the reality is, as a writer, the teacher doesn't own this piece of writing, the machine doesn't own this piece of writing, the kid does, and so it's a dance, you know, and it should be a dance. And that's part of what kids need to learn is they need to think about what their goals and intentions are for what they've written. They need to consider the feedback in that light and what feedback is helpful and what feedback is not what they're going to do, and I think that has implications for us as teachers. You know we want kids to engage in that dance because ultimately, sometimes we're right and sometimes we're not in the feedback that we give, and I think increasingly, with machine feedback, we're going to see more and more of this. I think it becomes very important for kids to be able to recognize this is a dance and that they only use the feedback that's going to make their paper better if it's their intention and their goals. Now that does mean you have to know what your goals and intentions are.

Lori: 24:04

Yeah, you know you're making me think. I wrote the word flexibility down while you were talking and you're making me think about just the flexibility needed, both as a teacher and as a student, like I know that. You know, when I I remember teaching fifth grade and they were so tied to what they would write on their paper, they didn't want to to re, to redo it, they didn't want to revise it. It was like no, I wrote this and this is it?

Melissa: 24:29

Did they ball it up and throw it in the trash?

Lori: 24:31

if you ask them to revise, I mean I did have kids do that, yeah, I mean, no, that's not bad, it's not, you know, but they were so they're so tied to it. And so I think too, like as a as a teacher, it's like okay, so where can I be flexible or help them kind of get that flexible cap on so that they're not so tied to what they wrote, that they're willing to go and revise it? And how can I make it manageable? You know, writing a whole thing on one piece of paper and then asking for a revision is I don't know. I felt like that was tricky, maybe writing paragraphs on different pieces of paper and taking it, you know, smaller steps and making it more manageable so that they felt more flexible, changing a sentence instead of changing the whole piece, right, that feels less overwhelming, both as a writer and a teacher.

Steve: 25:17

Well, I'm going to reinforce what you just said and I'll do another personal story here. When I was a college student, I had this disastrous semester at the Harvard of the South Valdosta State College, which sat on the Georgia-Florida state line where my family had moved when I was 16. And I flunked French. I lived six and a half years as a kid in France, so that was hard to explain, yeah, and I made the mistake of telling the French teacher that. And I got a D in my second composition course in college. So you might wonder why the heck I ever even went in that direction. But the paper looked like it had been. For those of you who are movie buffs, that film Psycho they have a shower scene where there's a stabbing with a knife through the shower curtain. Well, it looked like it was a shower curtain but it had bled to death with all the red on it. I burned the French book and the paper in my backyard where I was living at at the time, and never looked at either one of them.

Steve: 26:22

I think it's really important to realize we can overwhelm kids with feedback, and so you know I said earlier, you know we asked the kids to give three pieces of you know three positive comments and it could be two. It could be more pieces of feedback. You know three positive comments and it could be two. It could be more. But also I think we want to be cognizant that giving too much feedback can give us effects we don't want.

Steve: 26:50

I walked away from that experience thinking I couldn't write and it took about five years of being a grad, you know, going into doctoral program, and after that, before, I felt better about my writing capabilities. So I think you know you keep it to three or four or two, three or four important things that you want to get across. We often act like every time we give feedback it's going to change the whole world. All it's going to do is affect that piece of writing to some degree and hopefully something gets internalized. And the more things that we give, the less likelihood I think we're going to get a lot internalized because it's too much and sometimes it sends the wrong message. So you know, if it's one piece of feedback, if it's three pieces of feedback, it's going to depend on the kid. But I guarantee you if it's been in the psycho movie there's, what kids are going to take away is not what you want.

Lori: 27:44

I love that visual. I'm going to keep that. Don't psycho movie your students papers is the key takeaway from this.

Melissa: 27:53

I'm curious about one other thing that you mentioned, which was around the handwriting and spelling and typing. Now, and every time when I hear people, when I heard you talk about it and how that kind of gets in the way of the fluency of writing, it reminds me of reading fluency and how you know if you're still decoding and you're still working on your reading fluency, that's keeping you from being able to think more deeply about what you're reading. But at the same time, you know, in a classroom we don't want students to not do that kind of deeper thinking with listening comprehension and I'm wondering if that's the same for I would imagine it's the same for writing. We don't want to say, okay, until they are fluent with their handwriting and their spelling or typing, then don't do any other thinking processes with writing.

Steve: 28:41

No, that's a serious mistake. So when I was a student and I'll hark back to a small school in New Mexico, when I was in fifth grade, I remember the principal came in and did sentence diagramming with the class and you know it was kind of unique because it was the principal in there. But we never wrote. You know the years before that we just did handwriting and spelling. And then all of a sudden we're diagramming sentences and you know it just didn't connect to writing and given that we didn't write it, I'm not sure. You know, on the one hand I'm an okay speller, not a great speller, but I can spell. On the other hand, my handwriting is you might guess that it's not the best in the world and I'm not sure that I learned anything from that sentence diagramming that's been useful today.

Steve: 29:31

So you know, starting in kindergarten and sometimes even earlier than that, we want to have kids composed, whether it's with pictures, whether it's pictures and letters, whether it's pictures and words. That needs to be an integral part of the writing process. We want to avoid the two extremes. Basically, one extreme is all we do is teach skills and kids never, you know, they never get in the game. As I say with the basketball metaphor, and the other is that all they do is participate in the game, and so one of the problems with that is that some of the skills that help you play better in the game get mangled along the way.

Steve: 30:12

And so, as an example of this, my daughter, when she was in first grade they didn't teach any skills in her school. She would form a letter like you, like this, this, this and this. Every letter was like a drawing, and you can imagine how she felt about writing. She really disliked to write. They had their choice of whatever topic they wanted to write about. She would spend three days wandering around the room looking for a topic. Now what she was really doing, if I asked her, was she was avoiding writing because her handwriting and spelling were so difficult. So we need to have a good balance on this, and that balance, while this is hard, is going to depend upon individual students. Some kids come to school already knowing those skills, some kids do not, and so they may need more attention on that, and we have to make decisions as teachers which is very difficult in a classroom of 20, 25, or 30 kids what that balance is going to be for each kid 100%.

Lori: 31:19

And just to kind of add on to Melissa's question and maybe to have you clarify a bit you'd mentioned interactive writing earlier. I'm picturing that as being the bridge between something like you just described like you know, for our early writers, pictures and words, and for our more progressing writers, paragraphs or sentences and paragraphs. I'm thinking that that interactive writing, where the teacher is doing the writing, really lots of modeling, having some input from the students, having a lot of metacognition opportunities that that would be a bridge Is that is that like one way to think about it?

Steve: 32:04

It is one way of thinking about it, and I would add to that that you'd like to share the pen as you're doing that interactive writing, because, you know, I always think of things in terms of learning something, in terms of seeing it and then doing it. And on the path to doing it we have assisted doing where the teacher or peers, you know, kind of we participate together, but our end goal has to be being able to do it independently. And so that kind of interactive writing is moving in that direction where the teacher is taking the primary lead, modeling how to do stuff, talking about it, but students are participating in that process. If all they're doing is watching, then they're going to tune you out. Believe me, I can tell you as a young boy who didn't like school, you can tune a teacher out in a heartbeat.

Lori: 32:55

That is a really good point. Too much time just kind of watching isn't so helpful.

Steve: 33:00

Yeah, so it needs to be interactive.

Lori: 33:02

Yeah, interactive is the key word there and the first one. I like it. All right, I do want to talk a little bit more about these 21st century writing tools, because we get lots of questions about them. I'm sure that you do. I think we would be remiss if we had this conversation with you without talking a little bit about AI. So I think that these tools are going to help us rethink what writing looks like in some ways, but I'd love to hear from you what you think about 21st century tools.

Steve: 33:33

So I'm going to approach this in two ways. You know it used to be that the late 20th century tools were word processing. Right, we didn't have much word processing in classrooms but outside of school, kids were, you know, constantly using word processing, often writing without thinking they were writing because they were doing. You know they were interconnected with other people and communicating with them. When we did the elementary meta-analysis that you know that article was based on, we found that, you know, word processing had a pretty positive effect on improving overall writing quality. In our newest meta-analysis, word processing by itself, with spell checkers and grammar checkers, basically had no effect. So, you know, it's kind of like having a pen or paper and the joy of it is, you know, kind of the uniqueness of it and the interest is worn off. But what we did find is that word processing programs that allowed you to do kind of multimodal writing or that had games you know attached to them, gaming features attached to them, or had something that helped you plan, like inspiration I usually don't mention like a product, but that would be one or might give feedback that had a positive effect. In this newest meta-analysis.

Steve: 34:51

Now, you know, all of a sudden everything shifted around, you know, just a couple of years ago, with the introduction of ChatGPT. It's not like we didn't have artificial intelligence before. It was all around us. We just didn't think about it and people didn't go crazy, and especially people in humanities didn't go crazy until a computer could write a paper. But when it did, you thought the sky was falling. You know that the end of writing was near and, in all honesty, and you know, I think it's important to point out we're already seeing AI taking the place of some human writing in the world of business, where AI is writing and humans are not, and we see this in terms of people generating emails, in terms of generating advertisements and things like that. Now, there's still, in these cases, human oversight and kind of meddling in the machine's mind, so to speak, if you want to think of these kind of mindless machines as having a mind. But it's created an issue about what does this mean for writing instruction in schools? And I would say one thing right at the start these are not going to go away. That train is out of the station, it's rolling down the track. So the issue becomes how are we going to manage this and what are we going to do with this. So think about what I said. The primary value, or at least I think the primary value of writing is earlier and that is thinking. So we don't we lose something if machines produce text and you know, in a sense we're not having to think about that text. And that's a little bit challenging on our part because the thinking can occur before writing, during writing and as we revise. Okay, so we have to keep that in mind.

Steve: 36:47

However, we also can think about this in terms of a writing assistant. You know, in some ways, computers have become writing assistants for us. For those of us who are not great spellers like myself, spell checker is great. You know, in some ways, computers have become writing assistants for us. For those of us who are not great spellers like myself, spell checker is great. You know, it makes my life a lot easier. The grammar checker maybe a little bit so, but you know we can use these machines to help us in a lot of different ways, and just a simple example of this would be, let's say, I generate a sentence and I ask AI to give me several other options for that sentence, and then I have to make a decision about which of those sentences is my own or the options are most useful. Ai can help me, you know, pick a topic to write about. It can help me find information, although I still have to think critically about that right, because the information is not always right and, at least at the current time, citations on where it comes from doesn't come with it, and so what we're seeing in the few studies that are out there currently is that most of what AI seems to be being used for, you know, in small studies is help with planning and translation and a little bit more with, you know, revising and reviewing, although I suspect we're going to see a lot more on the revising and reviewing end in the future. So, you know, I think it behooves us to think about.

Steve: 38:14

We need to have school policies on this. We need to also have what I would call, instead of digital citizenship, digital and AI citizenship, so that students learn how to use these tools responsibly, ethically and safely. That's already in terms of digital citizenship, that's been around for a while. Um has been part of the. You know at least some schools of view on this, and some countries like China does a great job with this In terms of studies we've done there taking a look at digital citizenship, um, but AI needs to be woven into that Um and we need to be sure that teachers are prepared to use these tools.

Steve: 38:57

So I'm just finishing up a paper now in Norway with about 500 teachers where we surveyed them, and one of the things that they basically said to us they're not very well prepared to use this. They're a little bit more positive about their students' readiness to use it, but it's not great. But when we looked at whether or not they reported using AI to help them design lessons or whether students use it as a writing assistance, that preparation accounted for a good bit of variability in terms of whether they did this or not. So the more prepared, the more likely they were to use this, and that makes sense, right? If you don't know how to do something with it, you're not going to bring it into your classroom, and I guess the last thing I'd say on this is I think we're going to see and I already see this people will do this in creative ways.

Steve: 39:51

So I was in a school in Texas about a month or two months ago and we were talking with a teacher and it wasn't about AI, but this came up and she said. You know I'm using AI to help me work through miscues kids are making in their writing. But instead of showing a kid's piece of writing you know that is his name on it, or he knows that it's his it, or he knows that it's his or she knows that it's his I have AI generate a piece that's not that piece but has the same miscues in it, and so you know that. I thought that's really a great idea. You know that way you're not embarrassing anybody, you're not putting somebody on the spot, but you're still looking at the kinds of miscues that you want with kids and what their effect on meaning is and how to address that.

Steve: 40:36

So I think we're going to see a lot of kind of interesting things come out of this, but we clearly need to help teachers get a better handle on how to use this tool, and it's really a fast moving target. You know we have. You know, not that long ago we had chat GPT and now we have chat GPT-4. And there's a lot of different AIs out there that can be used for writing. I think we asked Norwegian teachers about 15 or so different chat GPT tools that they might have used. I haven't looked at that data yet. I haven't summarized that data yet, but I suspect it's going to be, you know, all over the place.

Lori: 41:18

That's. I love the idea of preparation instead of just thinking like, oh, I mean, well, if they use it, then they'll figure it out. Because, as we've talked about today, explicitly teaching things about writing are really important, and I love that idea of just preparing our students for that and also preparing our teachers. In the spirit of sharing stories I know you've shared a couple little stories today I'd love to share a story about something that happened in our house with AI, the use of AI, and then I'd love for you to just react to it and because I kind of felt like as a parent, I was like, all right, I'm doing my best here to help Um. So I, I have a seventh grader and you know she came home from school and was like we're learning about, uh, the circulatory system and how the blood goes through the heart and, um, I have these 20 vocabulary words, most of which I personally could not pronounce, um, and I need to use them to explain how the blood goes through the heart and the system works. And I thought, well, I don't know enough to write about this as an adult Definitely not a heart doctor, you know, that's not my training so I did have her pull up AI and we did a prompt. I said, well, you know, here's a prompt we could do. I kind of modeled it and talked through it. We included the vocabulary words and I said I think the best thing to do here since you clearly don't have the knowledge base that you need right now in order to write this, is to do this prompt. And then let's kind of like evaluate what it's saying and, while we might not have the vast knowledge base between us to get it all right, I think that you know some of these vocabulary words or we can cross-reference them and we're going to do the best we can here.

Lori: 43:06

And so she it came up with something and we did evaluate it and rewrote some parts. We broke some sentences down, we took some vocabulary words that you know were not words that she would use, and we rewrote the sentences and we learned something. Right, we were learning, but she didn't actually generate the gist of it because, as you were saying earlier, reading and writing are so connected and learning she just she didn't have the knowledge base. It was just nothing in her schema, it hadn't stuck to yet, and so, instead of spending four hours like trying to figure all this out, I was like let's just do this task and then let's just continue learning about this together.

Lori: 43:46

You know, obviously this is something that I emailed her teacher. I said, like when is when are we going to continue? Is this topic going to continue past winter break? What's the next topic? Like just trying to build some schema for what she is learning about so we could read and learn more at home. I mean, not make this like the last thing that we do around this topic, but, you know, try to make it a worthy task toward the goal of learning more. So I would just I mean, I would just love to hear from you as an expert here, like what you think about that, like what I maybe could have done better as a parent just helping at home and maybe a teacher listening will be like, oh, I'm going to try that tonight with my own kid. I don't know.

Steve: 44:28

I think what you did was great, okay. So if you think about it, you know she didn't know all the things she needed to know about the circulatory system and you know, as things get more complicated for those of us who are parents, who have been parents there's plenty of things our kids bring home we don't know about. So you did the right thing you looked, you sought help, which is a great self-regulatory strategy. You know we want students to know how to seek help. That helps you become a better self-regulated learner. And clearly we need to know how to do it. And so you ask AI to generate something for you that would help explain what was going on here. And if you had to stop there, then you know there would have been an ethical issue if she had turned that in as a paper and she probably would have needed to say, hey, ai generated this for me, but you didn't stop there. You used it as a tool for thinking about, you know, the circulatory system and looking at what was generated. And really, what was the purpose of this assignment? It was either twofold One is it's about learning more about the circulatory system or, you know, making sure you understand it. Or, second, it was about demonstrating your knowledge, which was really relating back to being able to learn it, so that you know, kind of evaluation, that you did that, talking about this, discussing it, thinking it through. What AI did for you here is it provided a tool that facilitated the learning process, and so you know, I think that's a great way to approach this and it's just kind of another illustration.

Steve: 46:05

We're going to see not only teachers, but parents and kids use these in smart ways. We just want to be sure that they use it in ethical ways as well, so they don't, you know, say here's my work and it really was AI that did it. In academia now, when we submit articles, I submitted something to a journal called Computers and Education yesterday and I you know it basically had a section that said is anything done by AI? You have to say what it was and, you know, share it. You're going to see, you know, people who develop AI, at least at the college level. They're going to have tools that help you look at a paper and decide what was done by AI and what was not. If you're an instructor, now, there'll be ways around that. Smart kids always find ways around that but you know that concern about ethical issues isn't going to go away. So we want to make sure we have the tools to ensure that students use these tools ethically, and more importantly is that they know how to do that.

Steve: 47:14

And you know I'll leave this with one last comment. You know there's all this worry about kids cheating and there was this interesting study that took a look at cheating before AI came out and then, using that sample, looked at a sample of kids after AI came out and kids were using AI and they didn't see any increase in cheating. You know some kids will cheat, but it's not a large percentage. And you know AI may make it more possible to cheat, but I don't think we're going to have a flood of cheating. You know, like 60% of our kids are not going to start cheating because they know that's not acceptable to do.

Lori: 47:54

Well and to your good point, steve, the conversation that actually ensued in our house that night was one about using our resources, ethical ways to approach our work, and I mean then it kind of snowballed into some plagiarism conversations as well. So I feel like we learned a whole lot, not only about the circulatory system, but also about other things that are really important to writing and that will help as we continue into high school and college and higher education, where we need to be citing things. I mean just, and also aware of where we're gathering our information and what we're, what we're writing down. And I just think it was something that ended up being really useful and really helpful and kind of opened the door for me as a parent to share these things without just bringing it up out of the blue. It was very contextualized.

Steve: 48:47

And so now you know that you're going to have parents across the country contacting you to help them with their child, with their homework.

Lori: 48:53

So here's the deal You're going to be like seventh grade writing, and then you're going to get it back and you're going to be like I don't know if my kid would use these words, so let's, let's look at this again.

Steve: 49:04

Well, you know it's interesting what you just said. We're not reporting this data in the study because the scale didn't come out reliably as we expected it to. But when you looked at individual questions, we asked teachers you know, about their ability to identify and these were these were secondary teachers their ability to identify. You know AI produced text and they were pretty confident that they can do that. And there is some, you know, research that suggests that. You know there are distinguishing features between AI text now and student written text, particularly for narrative texts. Ai is not particularly good at writing a story. They're much better at informational text, but you know God help AI if it has to write a poem or a story.

Lori: 49:54

So Taylor Swift is not going to be using AI to write her songs anytime soon.

Steve: 49:58

No, I don't think so.

Lori: 49:59

Probably for the best, because she's brilliant.

Melissa: 50:04

Before we let you go. You've mentioned throughout this podcast a new meta-analysis, a new paper. You're writing a new study that you did in Norway, so are there one or two things that you want to mention about any of this new research, about writing instruction that would be exciting for our listeners to hear about?

Steve: 50:23

So we've been involved in two federally funded really three federally funded large meta-analysis. One was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 2023 and looks at effective writing practices with kids in sixth grade to 12th grade and looks at 23 different instructional procedures. Not all of those were effective, but a good number of them were. The elementary one which we're finishing up the data analysis on now looks at 26 different interventions and we're a long ways from this because we're just started. We're looking at college as well on a meta-analysis with that.

Steve: 51:03

The other thing I should say we haven't written this yet, but we finished the analysis on a meta-analysis taking a look at high school and college kids' feedback from computers, and a few of those studies involved CHAP-GPT, but not bad. You know an effect size of about 0.40, which is a moderate effect, so getting feedback from a computer can be positive in. You know studies that look at that feedback over time, and so you know a lot of. What we're trying to do now is get a handle on what the literature generally says about teaching writing, coming back at it again but expanding on some new areas. There's no meta-analysis at the college level, so this will be the first time, but that's two and a half years away. It takes us a long time because we're talking, you know, 300, 400 studies. We look at 29 to 30,000 abstracts each time. So you know, by the time you're done with it, you never want to see it again. I hate to say that.

Lori: 52:08

Well, maybe you want to talk about it again in a couple of years. You can come back.

Steve: 52:11

I would be glad to do that. I mean, yeah, you don't want to see it again, but you do talk about it.

Lori: 52:20

So that's super exciting. First of all, we're so grateful for all that you do for writing, research and just every day just contributing so that teachers know more and best practices for their classrooms. We're also just really grateful that you came on to share with us and our listeners and you're kicking off 2025 with us in January, so we're so excited that you were here for this important conversation about writing. So thank you for saying yes to this conversation.

Steve: 52:48

Well, thank you for asking me, and I had fun, so that's always the most important thing.

Lori: 52:53

Thank you.

Melissa: 52:57

To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom, join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram and.

Lori: 53:06

Twitter. If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share with a teacher friend or leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Melissa: 53:17

Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.

Lori: 53:28

We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.